Jigoro Kano

Kano Jigoro (嘉納 治五郎 Kanō Jigorō, 28 October, 1860–4 May, 1938) is the founder of the Japanese martial art of judo.

Kano Jigoro was born to a sake brewing family in Mikage, Japan (near Kobe). After entering Tokyo Imperial University, he learned both Kito-ryū and Tenjin Shin'yo-ryū jujutsu, two styles focused on different aspects of traditional (koryū) fighting techniques.

About 1882, Kano established the martial art school that would, by 1886, be known as the Kodokan dojo. (The name means "the place for the study or promotion of the Way".) Over time, Kano was able to introduce his methods into the Japanese school system. His roles in Japan as an educator, promoter of amateur sport, and pioneer of modern sports are almost as famous as his founding of judo.

Kano was also a member of the the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for Japan, and throughout the 1930s, he promoted Japan's bid for the1940 Olympic Games. He hoped that international participation in these games would bring countries together and avoid war. In 1938, returning from an IOC conference, Kano died of pneumonia aboard the motorship Hikawa Maru.^[1] There was no 1940 Olympics, and Japan did not participate in the 1948 Olympics. However, in 1964, Japan finally hosted the Olympics, and in part due to the efforts of Kano's son Risei, judo was one of the demonstration sports at the 1964 Games.

Early years

Kano's family owned a sake brewery. (Family brands included "Shiroshika", "Hakutsuru", and "Kiku-Masamune".) However, Kano's father, Jirosaku Kireshiba Kano, was an adopted son who did not go into the family business. Instead, he worked as a lay priest and as a senior clerk for a shipping line.^[2] Kano's father was a great believer in the power of education, and he provided Jigoro, his third son, with an excellent education. The boy's early teachers included the neo-Confucian scholars Chikuun Yamamoto and Shusetsu Akita.^[3]

Kano's mother died when the boy was 9 years old, and his father moved the family to Tokyo. The young Kano was enrolled in private schools, and had his own English-language tutor. In 1874, he was sent to a private school run by Europeans. That way, his English and German skills would improve.^[2]

At the time, Kano stood 5 foot 2 inches but weighed only 90 pounds. He wished he were stronger.^[4] One day, a friend of the family, Baisei Nakai, who was a member of the shogun's guard, mentioned in passing that jujutsu was an excellent form of physical training. He then showed Kano a few techniques by which a smaller man might overcome a larger, stronger opponent. Kano decided he wanted to learn the art, despite Nakai's insistance that such training was an out of date and somewhat dangerous pastime. Kano's father also discouraged him from jujutsu, telling him to pursue a modern sport instead.^[5]

Kano pursues jujutsu, and meets a President

Undeterred, when Kano started college at age 17, he started looking for jujutsu teachers. He did this by first looking for bonesetters, called seifukushi, on the assumption that doctors knew who the better martial art teachers were. This brought him to Teinosuke Yagi, who had been a student of Isomata Emon in the Tenshin Shinyo Ryu school of jujutsu. Yagi in turn referred Kano to Hachinotsuke Fukuda, a bonesetter who taught Tenshin Shinyo Ryu in a 10-mat room adjacent to his practice. Tenshin Shinyo Ryu was itself a combination of two older schools, the Yoshin-ryu and Shin no Shindo Ryu.^[6]

Fukuda's training method consisted mostly of the student taking fall after fall for the teacher or senior student until he began to understand the mechanics of the technique. Fukuda stressed applied technique over ritual form. He gave beginners a short description of the technique and then had them engage in randori or free practice in order to teach through experience. It was only after the student had attained a certain level of proficiency that he taught them traditional kata. This method was difficult, as there were no special mats for falling, only the standard straw mats, known as tatami, laid over wooden floors.^[5]

Kano had trouble defeating Kanekichi Fukushima, who was one of his seniors at the school. Therefore, Kano started trying unfamiliar techniques on his rival. He first tried techniques from sumo. These didn't help. So, he studied some more, and tried a technique that he learned from a book on western wrestling. This worked, and katagaruma, or "shoulder wheel", remains part of the judo repertoire.^[7]

On August 5, 1879, Kano participated in a jujutsu demonstration given for former United States president Ulysses S. Grant. This demonstration took place at the home of the prominent businessman Shibusawa Eiichi. Other people involved in this demonstration included the jujutsu teachers Hachionsuke Fukuda and Masatomo Iso, and Kano's training partner Ryusaku Godai.^[8][9] Soon after this demonstration, Fukuda died at the age of 52. Kano then began studying with Masatomo Iso, who had been a friend of Fukuda. Despite being 62 years old and only standing 5 feet tall, his jujutsu training had given him a powerful build. Iso was known for excellence in kata. He was also a specialist in atemi, or the striking of vital areas. In Iso's method, one began with kata and then progressed to free fighting (randori). Due to Kano's intense practice and his solid grounding in the jujutsu taught by Fukuda, he was soon an assistant at Iso's school, and in 1881, at the age of 21, he gained a license (menkyo kaiden) to teach Tenshin Shinyo Ryu.^[7]

While under Iso's tutelage, Kano witnessed a demonstration by the Yoshin ryu jujutsu teacher Hikosuke Totsuka and later took part in randori with members of Totsuka's school.^[10] Kano was impressed by the Yoshin ryu practitioners and realized that he might never be able to beat someone as talented as Totsuka simply by training harder: he also needed to train smarter. Reportedly, it was this experience that first led Kano to believe that to be truly superior, one needed to combine the best elements of several ryu, or schools of jujutsu. Toward this end, he began to seek teachers who could provide him with superior elements of jujutsu that he could adopt.

After Iso died in 1881, Kano began training in Kito-ryu with Tsunetoshi Iikubo. Ikubo was expert in kata and throwing, and fond of randori. Kano applied himself thoroughly to learning Kito-ryu, believing Iikubo's throwing techniques in particular to be better than in the schools he had previously studied.^[6]

Professional life

Kano started college in Tokyo during June 1881. His majors were political science and economics, which were then taught by the Department of Aesthetics and Morals. He graduated in July 1882, and the following month, he began work as a professor, fourth class, at the Gakushuin, or Peers School, in Tokyo.^[11] In 1883, Kano was appointed professor of economics at Komaba Agricultural College (now the Faculty of Agriculture at University of Tokyo). However, in April 1885, he returned to Gakushuin, with the position of principal.^[11]

In August 1899, Kano received a grant that allowed him to study overseas. His ship left Yokohama on September 13, 1899, and he arrived in Marseilles on October 15. He spent about a year in Europe, and during this trip, he visited Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, and London. He returned to Japan in January 1891.^[12] He revisited Europe and North America during 1912-1913, 1920, 1932, 1933, 1936, and 1938, generally on Olympics-related business.^[13][14]

In January 1891, Kano was appointed to a position at the Ministry of Education. In August of the same year, he became dean at the Fifth Higher Normal School (present-day University of Tsukuba). One of the teachers at Fifth Higher between 1891-1893 was Lafcadio Hearn. Around this same time, Kano married. His wife, Sumako Takezoe, was the daughter of a former Japanese ambassador to Korea. Eventually, the couple had six daughters and three sons.^[15][16]

During the summer of 1892, Kano went to Shanghai to establish a program that allowed Chinese students to study in Japan. Kano revisited Shanghai during 1905, 1915, and 1921.^[13]

In January 1898, Kano was appointed director of primary education at the Ministry of Education. In 1901, he returned to Tokyo Higher Normal School,^[15] and he retired from this position on January 16, 1920.^[17]

In other matters, in 1906, Kano was a leader at a conference held in Kyoto that led to the standardization of martial arts taught in the Japanese public schools. He was involved organizing the Far Eastern Championship Games held in Osaka during May 1917, and in retirement, he served on the Japanese Council of Physical Education. He did not, however, play much part in organizing the Far Eastern Championship Games held in Osaka in May 1923, nor did he attend the 1924 Olympics in Paris.^[13]

Kano's honors and decorations included the First Order of Merit and Grand Order of the Rising Sun and the Third Imperial Degree.

Establishing Kodokan Judo

During the early 1880s, there was no clear separation from what Kano was teaching and what his teachers had taught in the past. Indeed, Iikubo came two or three times a week to support the training of Kano and his students.^[6] However, there came the day when student and master began to exchange places, and Kano began to defeat his teacher during randori:^[18]

To name his school, Kano revived a term that Terada Kan'emon, the fifth headmaster of the Kito ryu, had adopted when he founded his own style, the Jikishin-ryu: Judo. The name combined the characters ju, meaning 'pliancy', and do, which is literally "The Way" (Dao), but figuratively a method.^[19][9]

From a technical standpoint, the basic grounding for the system Kano created is found in the throwing techniques of the Kito-ryu and the choking and pinning techniques of the Tenshin Shinyo Ryu. These techniques are throughout the repertoire of the judo system. Judo's Koshiki no kata preserves the kata of the Kito-ryu with only minor differences in the details of the kata from the mainline tradition. Meanwhile, many of the techniques (but not the kata) of the Tenshin Shinyo Ryu are preserved in the Kime no kata.

Initially, Kano borrowed ideas from everywhere. As he himself said in 1898:^[4]

However, after judo was introduced into the Japanese public schools, a process that took place between 1906 and 1917, there was increasing standardization of kata and tournament technique.

The Kodokan develops

Besides promoting judo, Kano was also active in the development and growth of his judo organization, the Kodokan. This was necessary because the Kodokan's enrollment (and consequent need for practice space) grew from fewer than a dozen students in 1882 to more than a thousand dan-graded members by 1911.^[20]

In May or June 1882, Kano started the Kodokan dojo in space belonging to the Eishoji Temple.^[21] As noted above, Kano had only a handful of students at this time, but they improved their technique through regular contests with local police jujutsu teams.^[22][23][24]

The Kodokan moved to a 60-mat space in April 1890.^[25] In December 1893, the Kodokan started moving to a larger space located in Tomizaka-cho, Koishikawa-cho, and this move was complete by February 1894.^[26]

The Kodokan's first gankeiko, or winter training, took place at the Tomizaka-cho dojo during the winter 1894-1895. Midsummer training, or shochugeiko, started in 1896. "In order to inure the pupil to the two extremes of heat and cold and to cultivate the virtue of perseverance", Britain's E.J. Harrison wrote:^[27]

During the late 1890s, the Kodokan moved twice, first to a 207-mat space in November 1897, and then to a 314-mat space in January 1898.^[25]

In 1909, Kano incorporated the Kodokan, and endowed it with ¥10,000 (then about U.S. $4,700) of his own money. The reason, said Japan Times on March 30, 1913, was "so that this wonderful institution might be able to reconstruct, for that is what it really does, the moral and physical nature of the Japanese youth, without its founder's personal attention."

The Kodokan moved one more time during Kano's lifetime, and on March 21, 1934, the Kodokan dedicated this new 510-mat facility. Guests at the opening included the Belgian, Italian, and Afghan ambassadors to Japan.^[28] In 1958, when the Kodokan moved to its current 8-story, 986-mat, facility, this building was sold to the Japan Karate Association.

Kano's ideals for Kodokan Judo

On April 18, 1888, Kano and Reverend Thomas Lindsay presented a lecture called "Jiujitsu: The Old Samurai Art of Fighting without Weapons" to the Asiatic Society of Japan. This took place at the British Embassy in Tokyo. The theme of this lecture was that the main principle of judo involved gaining victory by yielding to strength.^[29]

Kano, being an idealist and an educator as well as a martial artist, had broad aims for his judo, which he saw as something that simultaneously encompassed self defense, physical culture, and moral behavior.^[30]

In 1915, Kano gave this definition to judo:^[3]

In 1918, Kano added:^[3]

During March 1922, Kano brought all this to fruition through the introduction of the Kodokan Bunkakai, or Kodokan Cultural Association. This organization held its first meeting at Tokyo's Seiyoken Hotel on April 5, 1922, and held its first public lecture three days later at the YMCA in Kanda. The mottoes of the Kodokan Cultural Association were "Good Use of Spiritual and Physical Strength" and "Prospering in Common for Oneself and Others." Although those are literal translations, the phrases were usually translated into English as "Maximum Efficiency with Minimum Effort" and "Mutual Welfare and Benefit." The theories of this organization were described in some detail in an article published in Living Age in September 1922.^[31]

As for Olympic judo, Kano was equivocal. In a letter to Britain's Gunji Koizumi written in 1936, he said:^[32]

Kano the educator

Kano stressed the importance of education throughout his lifetime. and in this area, his efforts may have been as great importance as his efforts in establishing judo. In a 1934 speech, he was quoted as saying,^[6]

Considering that he majored in political science and economics, people thought that after graduating from university, he would pursue a career in some government ministry. Indeed, through influential friends of his father's, he was initially offered a position with the Ministry of Finance. However, his love for teaching led him instead to accept a position teaching at Gakushuin. The students of Japan's elite attended Gakushuin and were of higher social positions than their teachers. The students were allowed to ride in jinrikishi (rickshaw) right to the doors of the classes, whereas teachers were forbidden. The teachers often felt compelled to visit the homes of these students whenever summoned to give instruction or advice. In effect, the teachers were treated as servants.^[5]

Kano believed this to be unacceptable. He refused to play such a subservient role when teaching his students. To Kano, a teacher must command respect. At the same time, he employed the latest European and American pedagogical methods. The theories of the American educator John Dewey especially influenced him.^[33] Kano's manner had the desired effect upon the students, but the administration was slower to warm to his methods and it was not until the arrival of a new principal that Kano's ideas found acceptance.^[5]

Death

In 1934, Kano quit giving public exhibitions. The reason was failing health, probably compounded by kidney stones. "People don’t seem to think he will live much longer", the British judoka Sarah Mayer wrote friends in London.^[34] Nonetheless, failing health or not, Kano continued attending important Kodokan events such as kagami-biraki (New Years' ceremonies) whenever he could, and in 1936 and 1938, he went abroad on Olympics business. About 5:33 a.m., May 4, 1938 (Tokyo time), Kano died at sea, aboard the NYK motorship Hikawa Maru.^[35] There are allegations that Kano was murdered by poisoning rather than dying of pneumonia.^[36] Although this conspiracy theory is popular on the Internet, there is little contemporary documentation to support it.

• Passengers aboard Hikawa Maru noted that Kano was very ill from May 1, 1938, until his death.^[35]

• Mourning was international. See, for example, Royal Brougham's obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer^[37] and the condolences sent by Avery Brundage and other US Olympic officials.^[38]

• Kano's death represented a blow to the Japanese efforts at obtaining the 1940 Olympics for Japan. But the blow was hardly fatal, inasmuch as the president of the Japanese International Olympic committee was Prince Iyesato Tokugawa.^[39][40]

• Finally, although the Japanese Army withdrew its world-class equestrian team from Olympic competition in September 1937,^[41] the Soviet-Japanese border wars that caused Japan to abandon its efforts to host the 1940 Olympics did not start until late July 1938.^[39]

In short, in May 1938, there was little reason for anyone in the Japanese government to assassinate Kano. If discovered, his murder would have evoked enormous public outrage, and if not discovered, his death would have little impact on whether Japan would or would not host the Olympics in 1940. One other point to consider: the Kodokan did not become directly subject to government control until September 1942 (and then only after formal resistance that lasted about six months).^[42]

Published works

• Kano, Jigoro. (October 1898 - December 1903). Kokushi.
• Lindsay, Thomas and Kano, Jigoro. (1889, 1915 reprint). "The Old Samurai Art of Fighting without Weapons", Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, XVI, Pt II, pp. 202-217.[19]
• Kano, Jigoro. (Jan. 1915 - December 1918). Jūdō.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1922). "Jiudo [sic]: The Japanese Art of Self Defence", Living Age, 314, pp. 724-731.[20]
• Kano, Jigoro. (1932). "The Contribution of Jiudo [sic] to Education", Journal of Health and Physical Education, 3, pp. 37-40, 58 (originally a lecture given at the University of Southern California on the occasion of the Xth Olympiad).[21]
• Kano, Jigoro. (1934). "Principles of Judo and Their Applications to All Phases of Human Activity", unpublished lecture given at the Parnassus Society, Athens, Greece, on June 5, 1934, reprinted as "Principles of Judo" in Budokwai Quarterly Bulletin, April 1948, pp. 37-42.[22]
• Kano, Jigoro. (1936). "Olympic Games and Japan", Dai Nippon, pp. 197-199. In Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, eds., Martial Arts in the Modern World. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2003, pp. 167-172.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1937). Judo (jujutsu) by Prof. Jigorō Kanō. Tokyo: Board of Tourist Industry, Japanese Government Railways.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1937). "Jujutsu and Judo; What Are They?" Tokyo: Kodokwan.
• Kano, Jigoro. (Undated.) Jujutsu Becomes Judo.[23]
• Kano, Jigoro. (1972). Kanō Jigorō, watakushi no shōgai to jūdō. Tokyo: Shin Jinbutsu Oraisha.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1981). Kanō Jigorō no kyōiku to shisō. Publication data unknown.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1983). Kanō Jigorō chosakushū. Tokyo: Gogatsu Shobo.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1986). Kodokan judo/Jigoro Kano; edited under the supervision of the Kodokan Editorial Committee. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International.
• Kano, Jigoro. (1995). Kanō Jigorō taikei/kanshū Kōdōkan. Tokyo: Hon no Tomosha.

References

See also

Template:Wikiquote

• Tenjin Shin'yo-ryū
• Kito-ryūast:Jigoro Kano

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